John,
I made couple phonecalls over this .22 conversion. Initially I was told it to be Aimo Lahti being the designer, but newest info indicates it to be Mr. Saloranta. The creation goes under a nickname of 'Salobellum'.
Apparently not that many conversions were made, hence they are rare and pricey. (I was in too much of awe at the time I took the photo, so I didn't realise to ask history of that conversion
I don't have any history books on P08 - I just concentrate on shooting it [img]smile.gif[/img] (So I have no reference material where to look up stuff).
I tried various word combos on this .22 conversion as scrounging info in the internet. Only 'salobellum' gave appropriate results. Here is a copied cut-away from a Russian gun page, translated into English by allmighty AltaVista powered automatic translator.
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"...Later it created the combat pistol, which, however, was rejected in favor of the pistol of the same Lahti "L -35".Saloranta is the developer of the complete set Of "salobellum" for the repartition/conversion of the pistol of caliber 22 OF LR into the pistol Lueger pistol. "
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Original Russian text located at:
http://club.guns.ru/lahti.html
I'll tuck this behind my ear and I'll come back to this sometime later when I get more info.
-Artsi